deeplyshallow // sex machine

sex machine

So I bought a MacBook.

And as soon as I placed the order I thought: Wow, I’m an idiot. It’ll take five days to get here, and meanwhile I could’ve just picked one up at the local Mac store. I mean, it wasn’t as if I placed a complicated, over-customized order — I just ordered the basic black notebook. And after all, these things ship from China. It arrived on Monday, however, and all was well. It’s not as if I would’ve had much time to play around with it this weekend anyway.

I’m still waiting for my two gigs of memory to show up from the third-party outfit I ordered it from. Should’ve been here by now, which means maybe I’ve been had. At least if that’s the case I’ll only be out $150. At that price I could buy the memory all over again (from a better vendor, perhaps) and still end up paying less than Apple charges to factory install their own 2GB chips.

So far I’m in love. As you can see, the MacBook is measurably smaller (and thinner and lighter) than the Dell Inspiron I’ve been working on for the past year or so. As you can also see, it shows fingerprints clearly, which is not so hot. I’ll have to keep some wipes around for this one; as it is, it would appear that I’ve been using the machine after eating a plateful of barbecued ribs.

There have been enough fetishistic blog posts by people who have also bought MacBooks that I don’t really see the need to add much to it. It’s been four years, give or take, since I’ve done any serious time on a Mac, so I couldn’t possibly dig deeply enough to satisfy the curiosity of Mac addicts. But I can definitely tell you about a few things I dig about this little machine.

One is the ability (with Boot Camp or Parallels) to run Windows XP. Because the current versions of Adobe’s heavy graphics software aren’t intended to work on the Mac’s new Intel processor, I intended to dual-boot Windows XP, and continue using my Windows-based Adobe software (at least until Adobe releases their next generation). So I did: I installed Boot Camp, and then Windows XP, and everything went unbelievably smoothly right up to the point where XP decided that it wasn’t going to play nice with my product key. So after much struggle, I gave up, de-partitioning the drive and wiping XP off of the face of my MacBook forever. I’d rather run Photoshop through emulation for a little while.

One toy I couldn’t wait to play with is Delicious Library, which will organize libraries of various media for you. With my DVD library expanding rapidly, this seemed irresistible to me. Delicious lets you use the MacBook’s built-in iSight camera as a barcode scanner — it outputs those familiar red lines and reads the barcode on each DVD you hold up. Of course, it could be better — for every three DVDs that Delicious recognized and filed appropriately, it would choke on three more. Manually searching for each of my DVDs ended up being a faster solution to the input problem. As you log each movie, the MacBook speaks the DVD’s title. Somewhere along the line, somebody included a few little easter eggs. (That is, I’ve found one, but I assume there are more.) When I scanned in my copy of the Star Wars trilogy collection, the MacBook read the following: “Star Wars Trilogy, widescreen edition with bonus disc.” After a small pause, during which time I’d moved on to the next DVD, trying to orient the barcode properly, the MacBook ’spoke’ in a lower, creepier voice: “I am your father.”

There are still kinks to be worked out — like learning not to drag my palms over the trackpad while I’m talking (that fucker’s pretty sensitive) — and there are a few things I’ll have to learn to live with, if a little unhappily — like the powerful heat that emits from the notebook’s lower left quadrant — but so far I’m pleased. The spinning beach ball crops up a little too often — 512MB of memory doesn’t cut it these day — and I’m running out of patience with the undelivered memory upgrade. But I’ll live. The MacBook’s definitely a sexy little machine, which I couldn’t say about the Dell (which looked like the offspring of a refrigerator and a toaster). I’ll forgive it the little things for now.